All roads lead to a mural in Portland

View full sizeMotoya Nakamura/The OregonianConnections among individuals are the theme of this mural at a new Innovative Housings Inc. apartment complex in Portland. Each tile in the mural was hand-painted by one person.Last Friday evening, at an apartment complex just off 82nd Avenue on Northeast Broadway, a small group, many of them strangers, gathered in the courtyard to consider how so many different paths could ultimately lead them all to the same place -- in this case, a wall-size mural, inscribed with a question that has everything and nothing to do with geography:

"How do you get there?"

For a moment, let's trace one of those paths: that of the woman who set all this in motion, an artist, Maria T.D. Inocencio.

She was born in New York and attended The Cooper Union, where she met her husband, Mark Smith. Eventually, the couple, who now have two children, moved to Portland.

Over the years, Inocencio's work often touched on themes of time, its passage, lineage, the accumulation of experience, seeing the familiar in entirely new ways -- all in intimate, personal ways.

Then she fell into a project at her children's North Portland school, helping to organize a volunteer effort to transform a patch of blacktop into a rain-water garden -- a project that ultimately linked dozens of people from many backgrounds. The experience got her thinking even more about the complexity of the connections that run between us, how to explore -- and make visible -- the ways in which our individual lives intersect to create something more complex.

View full sizeMotoya Nakamura/The OregonianMaria Inocencio, a Portland artist, was commissioned to create a mural that would bridge differences."It got me thinking in a broader way about how to open up my work," she says.

She began creating work that invited large-scale participation -- for example, manufacturing her own patchwork map of the world, constructed entirely around the birthplaces of strangers, tracing the roads that serendipitously lined up between these new markers; measuring hundreds of wrists to weave individual bracelets that were then linked together, according to individual connections, into one large wall hanging -- a net measuring about 8 feet tall by 8 feet wide ("just big enough to catch a person," Inocencio says.)

Now she is here in the courtyard because a nonprofit developer named Innovative Housing Inc. wanted to build apartments for those with low incomes on a patch of land in the Madison South neighborhood where a freeway on-ramp once stood.

Innovative Housing, recognizing that sometimes such projects can trigger unease or resistance in a neighborhood -- mostly over what's unknown -- wanted to find ways from the start to bring everyone together and bridge "any sense of alienation," says Minda Stiles, Innovative Housing's deputy director.

Someone suggested involving everyone in a collaborative art project, something that could become a permanent part of the neighborhood. That led to Inocencio and her thinking about our unexpected intersections.

Over several weeks last spring, Inocencio, with a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, held eight workshops for apartment tenants and neighborhood residents where everyone was invited to paint a tile representing an important path he or she had taken.

And so 151 people set about trying to distill that very personal idea into a small painting, thinking about how exactly they had ended up where they are today.

What they came up with: A farmhouse from 1908. A winding mountain trek. A portrait of someone's son.

View full sizeMotoya Nakamura/The OregonianDesire Nahimana, 8, and Erin Levenick, community advocate and activities coordinator for Innovative Housing Inc., look for the tiles they painted.And then there they were in the same place, sharing paint, eating cookies, trying to figure out which brush was best, the chairwoman of the neighborhood association at the time getting color advice from a little boy who lives in the complex.

"Look how you can start with nothing -- and get to this," Inocencio says.

All those paths, Inocencio arranges in a larger grid. With an intricate network of lines, she then traces all the possible paths between each tile, challenging us to consider how seemingly disparate images might relate.

The mural is mounted in the courtyard of the Broadway Vantage Apartments and Friday, everyone who participated was invited to see it.

The effect is a living map of the murals' suggested connections. More paths twist and intersect.

There are Inocencio's father and mother, who have driven from Arizona. Not far from them stands Ruth Hander, the past chairwoman of the neighborhood association. (Although she's not much of an artist, she says, and was uncertain of what to paint, she made a tile. "I thought, 'Well, go ahead and try it. I don't know. Give it a whirl.' ")

One notes a tile featuring a baby's footprint, only to later run into the baby herself -- a girl named Harvest, now 8 months old -- and her mother, Jana Hobbins, who along with her other daughter, Hope, 2, and husband, Walter, live in the Broadway Vantage. They each painted a tile. So did their friends, who with their children also live in the neighborhood.

Jana Hobbins says she loves the idea that there is now a record of their lives here, a record of where they made their home and the friendships they formed. Something they can return to, with their children -- a reference point for future paths, extending from this one.

She looks over at the mural, dense and complex.

"We talk about it," she says, "How we can come back in a few years and say, 'Look at what you made.' "